Concert

'More than a secret society: Schumann’s Davidsbündler ideology as reflected in the piano trios of Schumann and the young Brahms'
Abstract:
The increasing technical and musical demands of Schumann's Op. 63 (1847), and the young Brahms’s Op. 8 (first version, 1854), brought the evolution of the piano trio genre to a pinnacle. They embodied Schumann’s youthful ideal of the Davidsbündler, which was, according to Schumann, ‘more than a secret society’; it was an ideology that he conveyed in his music journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik to oppose the ‘philistines’ of art. In these piano trios, I will demonstrate how Davidsbündler could be translated into esoteric fugal elements for the connoisseur, private allusions for the secret listener, and virtuosic displays for the soloistic ensemble.
See concert on 21st March for the performance of the complete first version of Brahms's Op. 8.